Category: Memoir Excerpts

Vile

“After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –“

Emily Dickinson

*Triggering Content Warning*

It has been quite a long few months since my last book excerpt share. It’s still new and a bit emotional each time, no matter the number of details or how often I do it. Reminding myself that it is ok to talk is an exercise just as much as a headache, at times.

I cannot remember the moment I took better hold on my self worth and separation from toxicity. I had relied on validation to such a fault when I was younger that I would fall into such deep depressions when it was not there. I would wallow in self pity and hide from the world, grossly engulfed by the idea that if I was not being used, I was not useful or important. It has taken a lot of unlearning to dislodge this ridiculous thought process. I still struggle and fall into feeling that way about people, even now, who would literally jump in front of a train for me.

Still, these feelings are always deeply rooted from past traumas that were never dealt with properly and can come back to bite me, knowingly or not. As is probably obvious by now, every so often I work out some of these thoughts into chapters. Writing what I know is…what I know.

So here we go, again…

~

“You have no idea what it means to be a Black woman, ya know.” My father once stated, staring me square in the eye with a hint of a serpent’s grin. He enjoyed bringing up my flaws and failures regularly in conversation, sometimes completely out of left field. I internally recoiled into the awful, oversized, leather couch while asking what exactly that meant, getting no answer of use in return.

I was in my early twenties, only working just a few years at that point, and was still learning how real world racism worked outside of cult life racism and where exactly I fit in with folks. I was also on the slow road to learning how to recognize that abusive and toxic relationships can shape how you live and think. My own path to just learning self respect would, unfortunately, come way too many years later.

My father was correct in many ways, I truly did not know what it meant to own my confidence and represent as a Black woman at the time and, at that point, I had no mentors to turn to. Outside of learning more about my hair and how to care for it from the internet, I was still learning a lot about myself. Up to that point, all of the friends closest to me were either white or mixed, like myself. Making friends would not end up being my forté in life early on. I was too sheltered and had no knowledge of social cues or the dos and don’ts of how to be treated correctly by others. I did not understand other people and I had no idea what self respect meant. Many incidents along the way should have taught me better how to care for and shield myself but not comprehending how to understand others was not a great start. 

I was a sucker for love and attention, I craved care so badly that it pushed my heart into many circles it should not have been and many harmful situations that were tough to get out of. Manipulation and control seemed to be what I was most subconsciously attracted to in other people. I found myself in relationships where I was the butt of the joke, the annoying fool, the last picked, and the most naive. The singular Black girl at every birthday and slumber party who believed she looked like everyone else and fit in just the same. 

Some incidents proved minor with major impact while others have become difficult to acknowledge. Setting them aside, I fully dissociate with them at times, saying to myself, “That did not happen to you, that was a different girl.”

Some humiliations, though, will never be shaken no matter how far dissociated they are driven. Middleschool slumber parties, waking up to the giggles of girls whispering while fixing and pouring their breakfasts without you. Your hand submerged in a glass of warm water and your body wrapped in a urine soaked sleeping bag. Trying to remain calm and laugh it off like everyone else, “Guess the experiment worked, huh!”. The tears would come later, back home when you are alone. You should never be the kid to ruin a party by crying, I had unfortunately learned the hard way. It was always tough being the target and it never got easier.

High school and the years that followed are still a mass of locked away memories that are better left on dusty shelves, however, certain traumas are a bit more difficult and painful to detach from. One, in particular, a most poignantly degrading moment in my youth where time felt to have frozen in a moment of shattering glass; the realization of feeling lesser than a fellow human being and more “in my place”. 

I thought I was one of the cool kids back then. You know, those friends that are maybe a year or two your senior who had their own cheap vehicles to get us wherever we wanted to go, whenever we wanted to go. I knew I was not the most popular or the pretty one in the group but I was alright with it as long as I could be included. That is what I craved, to be included. In those days I was still a tomboy, even after school was over and done, so I was always comfortable being one of the guys. I felt like I was a part of something that others looked in on from the outside and it felt kind of good. Until that day.

~

Back then, my church friends and I loved the joy of camping. Tents, cabins, sleeping bags, campfires, waterfalls – you name it, we did it. The rugged outdoors was a place to plant your feet into a sense of freedom and a general release of your inner animal. Dirt, fire, and swisher sweets for a full holiday weekend twice a year. Sleeping under the stars on the clear nights and huddling near fires together on the cold ones. It was heaven. I still miss that feeling.

I tended to be a gofer in certain circles. The fetcher of things, bringer of items, carrier of bags. I figured it was a sort of dues to be inside with the cool kids. People pleasing was already my ultimate passion and “Sorry” was my second middle name. I did not like people feeling anything adverse towards me, especially if it meant a compromise in our friendship.

It was a camping weekend much like all the others. We had recently arrived, unpacked, and settled together in the dining hall, and were ready for a popular tradition; visiting the local town just a few miles outside the campsite. We would plan an early weekend pile into multiple cars and drive into town for supplies and snacks we either forgot to pack or did not feel like purchasing ahead of the journey. It would also give us a chance to hit up our favorite local diner and old time ice cream shop. 

As usual, there was always a large group of us that wanted to tag along so the carpool plans were haphazardly organized, and seats were eventually filled, only occasionally (and accidentally) leaving a fellow man behind. I tagged some friends from a former life as my ride, and slipped into the back of the four person full car, a frat boy outfitted vehicle, blaring overdone indie rock and wreaking of axe body spray. I was ready to begin this leg of the trip.

As we worked our way slowly over the dirt and gravel roads away from the camp, ensuring not to pop a tire, we passed through my favorite stargazing field, across the road from which sat a large set of dumpsters. The dumpsters were strategically placed near the entrance of the camp ground in order to herd bears away from the primary areas where people gathered to prevent attacks. Makes one wonder what the fuck we were doing stargazing right across the way, but I digress.

As the dumpsters came into sight, my thoughts of later stargazing were pulled through a fog by a voice saying, “Stop! Can we make a stop at the dumpsters?” I was still in a daydream when I was snapped back into reality by the realization of what was happening. 

Undoing her jeans and reaching in casually, as if somehow suggesting a picture of normalcy or decorum, this person yanked a tampon from her vagina and threw it into some nearby trash from the car floor. Wrapping it quickly, she shoved it in my direction and ordered me to walk it to the dumpster. She was just “too tired” to do so. 

At first I thought everything occurring was a bad joke or a terribly confusing dream from a twisted and unknown subconscious. “Is this happening to me right now?”, I thought, “do people do this? Am I supposed to say ‘yes’?” The damage of embarrassment was boring into my brain by the time it had all begun to register. I looked around waiting for the uncomfortable males in the front seats to say something but, no. Why would they, they were guys, I am sure it was a first for them too. 

Completely reserved as well as shocked, I quietly and quickly exited the car and walked the refuge to the dumpsters, staggering back to the car, confused and humiliated. I covered it up as if it never happened and tucked it away, as if I should have been the one to feel shame. Abuse had shown me so many masks at this point and humiliation was a popular one used to remind me of my place. 

“It did not happen to me,” I echo, still today, “ that was a different girl.”

~ For No One, by A. L. Stippich

When a situation is wrong, you can feel it. Listening to your gut rarely steers a person incorrectly, and if something is questionable, there should always be people to ask and defend you. Unfortunately, ‘always’ is not true for everyone and trauma comes in all shapes, sizes, and in every shade of ugly. It’s important, when being afraid to talk, to remember the joke is most definitely always on the abuser. No human wants their evil on display and no human deserves to be treated as less than.

This was a tough segment to share, for sure, but one I felt needed sharing. I think this can only be best concluded with a friendly reminder:

The world is brimming with some amazingly good souls. Find them, love them, and cherish them as often as you can. Do not let the persons blocking your view prevent you from seeing the whole of the masterpiece.

Cheers, xoxo

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for the love of the game

It took me twenty some years to find out that my mother had a major love for baseball. Twenty years of no games on the television and seemingly no interest and this woman sits and sketches me a diagram of a field, rules and all. I remember the first time sitting and listening to her talk about baseball. REALLY talk; I think my jaw fell open. Who is this? A completely unknown form of poetry in itself, America’s “favorite pastime” that was unbeknownst to me.

As I share parts of my book, I am inclined to stress that, though much of my childhood was a shattered mess, there is a reason I am still here. There are positive and beautiful memories I can look on that help remind me that every moment has its purpose.

Today’s segment, while short, still makes me teary eyed when I think on the memories it invoked.

~

“I have always known I was a writer. I have my mother to thank for that.

My first inspiration. A poet herself, her love of poetry was recognizable by her book collection as well as the books she surrounded us with. Her favorite poet was Emily Dickinson, but it was always her other collections that held my eye more. The obscure writers, Black and White, from the sixties and seventies whose pain and transparency bled crimson from each page; a rhythmic manifesto for a generation’s angst. Writers with such rich descriptions and overwhelmingly strong capabilities of waking up parts of my heart that I did not even know were there. Admittedly, I was too young to understand most of what I was reading when I first started pulling these books from the shelf, but I would learn. I was a motivated spirit when it came to words, I loved the way with which poetry painted the human condition, and I wanted to learn to do the same.

No parent read a book like her; a master of voices, my mum always read aloud like a conductor, with precision and ease. Each character had their own specified voice, some of them I still recall to this day. High voices, deep voice, squeaky and silly voices, transitioning from each one with a small grin. By the time the books were finished, her voice was always slightly shot yet, we always wanted more.

I remember loving words so much as a kid that I would memorize large sections of children’s books that she read to us. I even went so far as to then “read” the books to my baby brother, which impressed her greatly, until she saw I was reading Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham upside down.

As soon as writing sentences made some semblance of sense, I found a way to weave thoughts, stories, and poems together. I got as much use as humanly possible out of my mother’s clunky, late-eighties, electric typewriter when I was seven years old and I never grew tired of it. I can still hear the tapping sound the keys made and the “snap-snap-snap” of the machine pounding the key letters one by one as it printed onto the paper back and forth across the bar. Writing and books were the first things in life I remember losing time to. Endless hours of words on a summer evening and seconds later it is three in the morning and my light would be the last on in the house. Eventually, I realized I was better at writing than I was at speaking.“

~ For No One, by A. L. Stippich

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take me to church

“Religion is a breeding ground

Where the devil’s work is deeply found…“

~ Sleeping at Last

*Triggering Content Warning*

What does it mean to say “I grew up in the church.” Some of us make the statement without even thinking about the weight of it, myself included. Just a standard fact of observation, a piece of historical data written into your code. We do not talk about how it affected us, positively or negatively, how it shaped us to be outside of the church walls, and how we interact with other human beings on a day to day basis because of it. The environments with which we are raised define everything about the final product of which we become, and being raised in a church setting is not free of its destructive demons.

It is a different story each time. Some people have had amazing experiences within a church setting growing up while others drift away from their church, often from experiences that are starkly contrast.

My experience was the latter.

In our world, gossip was currency. One prayer for a juicy detail that would make its rounds through the slacked jaws of the church pews until it came back to you, diseased and distorted. Emotional manipulation, blackmail, and racism were just a few more of the first things I learned about what it meant to be a part of my church.

My experience has far too many layers to gather within a single post or even a chapter. So lets just start from the beginning.

~

“By the time I was a preteen, I was a bible hugging, awkward, and overly curvy brown girl with hair no one knew what to do with, nor wanted to deal with. To top everything off with the sweetest of cherries, I grew up having no inkling on how to socialize outside of warped, cult-like church beliefs and ideas. I felt like the divine recipe for a walking disaster. I was always saying the wrong things, giving the wrong looks, talking too much, talking too little, and everything in between. With body parts most preteens had not even started growing yet, I had no self-esteem and was surrounded by dozens of skinny, straight haired, white girls who could wear their hair down and adorn scant bikinis while a simple two piece was considered ‘inappropriate for a body like’ mine.

I can recall as early as ten years of age having my body stared at, discussed, and over-sexualized by adults in the church community in open and public conversations in front of me, sometimes even pulling in their own children to demonstrate my iniquities of having a shape.

“look at my daughter”, I vividly recall one mother boasting loudly in a hall bustling with my rowdy peers. She roughly yanked at the bottom of her offspring’s man-sized, knee length, tie-dye monstrosity to indicate minimum length requirements. “Modest, Christian girls wear shirts like this, not like yours,” she huffed in disgust as her gaze scanned me from head to toe.

I was wearing a t-shirt and a club vest.

How I looked was always being picked apart by adults who just provided their children with ruthless ammunition to make their own assessments of my body. I became a constant target practice for the girls within my religious clubs, made up of non-profit evangelical groups, that my parents had enrolled me in at the age of five. Bullied incessantly for my hair, the way I talked, and more than anything, the way I dressed; my thrift store clothing purchases were never the talk of the town.

I still remember my first pair of Nike shoes, white with baby blue lining that almost glowed. I was beyond excited to finally have something that would help me fit in. It was not even a week later when I would be shoved into a dark corner away from adult eyes, pinned against the white washed, brick wall, having my Nike adorned toes stomped on over and over while being accused of buying fakes. It was around that moment that it began to feel like nothing I could change about myself would make things different.

Even pedophilic men within the church, some fathers themselves, were no strangers to myself and my female peers body types. It was not uncommon to hear a man in his forties approach a father to inform him that “his [twelve year old] daughter’s tight fitting look was causing himself and other men in the church to stumble.”

Translation in the real world – a forty year old man and his buddies, who could not keep it in their pants even during Sunday church services, were struggling to not find a twelve year old as a sexually viable candidate and it was the child’s fault. It was always the child’s fault.

~

These same men who cheered on their sons as their one night rendezvous were tallied up between high school and college like a competing scoreboard that defined masculinity the higher the numbers grew. The same men who, when women approached them for safety from spousal abuse, no matter how beaten, bloody, and bruised, would give the same repetitive, monotone advisement –

“That’s something you’ll just have to work out with your husband…”

In the church, even from childhood, I learned two very important things about how the sexes should behave and obey. Men were given every single excuse in the book on a golden platter while women were instructed to keep their men “happy” in the bedroom and in the kitchen or else they deserved every ounce of disrespect, infidelity, physical and emotional torture they were dealt.

A fresh take of hell on earth, surrounded by adults catering to sick thoughts, family structures, and the poor moral judgements of other adults. A cult under the guise of a steeple.”

~ For No One, by A. L. Stippich

Our stories are important, no matter what the elements are that make them up. To ever believe that your history is what should define your road moving forward, however, is not moving forward at all.

Many will ask me today where I am with Christ and if I am a Christian still, and while the Ron Swanson part of my narcissism would prefer to say I’m a “practicing none of your damn business,” my answer is usually just ‘yes’ and then it is time to move the conversation along.

My faith is my own now, and for the first time in my life, it is protected and healing from the decades of war caused by others tearing it down. It is not for anyone to dissect and analyze under an equally flawed microscope. My faith belongs to me, and my spiritual journey is no longer defined by a building filled with other broken human beings.

It is between me and my god.

4

The Magic Jaw

“I can’t tell you why you shoulda’ known it, sensitive kid start acting like a grown up”

Cold War Kids

*Triggering Content Warning*

“You were such a little brat as a child, I hated having to deal with you. You have grown so much since then!”

Adults of my past went to such great lengths to ensure I was aware of how they felt about my younger self the moment I hit twenty, which I assume is the official age where your child self and your adult self automatically sever ties forever, or at least it was for me based on the generalized assumption. I have laughed, grinned, and waved this off as a silly comment and accepted it as the “compliment” it was meant to be because breaking into tears would suddenly make me an overly dramatic victim. “Be quiet, little girl and take the nice compliment,” I would tell myself, “you made it!”

Since then, I find moments where I dwell in it. I cry. I hurt for that little girl who kept trying to not just be seen as the obnoxious child/adolescent/teen in the adults’ way but a child raising red flag after red flag just to be ignored and labeled. They are moments I carry because I can never try again and will always remain someone’s historical stain and a failure. Why go to such trouble to tell someone that that they were neither loved nor cared about as the unwanted negro child inside their children’s realm? What was the intent? Why could it not be, “You know, you were a tough kid to deal with, what was happening to you at home that made you that way?”

This is my first chapter excerpt posting. This is dedicated to them –

~

I must have been five or six years old when I remember it happening for the first time. A relatively cloudy day, however, the weather was clear enough that a trip to a popular, local park playground became a part of that day’s agenda. I loved the swings. Feeling like air itself, rushing around you, within you, through you – this was the playground high that everyone should experience at least once.

In a moment of immature and childish passion, when it was time to journey home, my lips burst into a fit of raspberries towards my mom in retort to her request for us to prepare, my feet preoccupied, whooshing through the air in front of me. A second request would be met with the same response, and the third request included a threat that, at the time, felt empty.

“One more time, and I am telling your father”.

I challenged this with a fit of giggles and another blow of raspberries, not understanding the true consequence of what was to come. I was too young and at the time, I did not know ‘I am telling your father’ meant fear. I was ignorant of the idea of consequences at that point and what that scenario may look like in real life. In my life.

It is not an uncommon threat, I have learned, while growing up around other families. Moms have the tough job of keeping our asses in check and the stress of carrying out each necessary punishment to ensure we grow up as proper human beings is not the “dream” part of the job. To expect them to do it alone is a call on a feat of champions.

It was a relatively cloudy day.

Later that afternoon, my father would return home from another ‘hard day’s work’ and the news of my disobedience would be delivered with prioritized haste. To this day, I am not aware of how that conversation went, but swiftly, it would be received, and before I knew it, I was being summoned to the dining room table for questioning.

There he sat, arms crossed over his chest, expressionless he stared directly into my eyes, my mom standing to the side, eagerly waiting for his verdict.

“Come here”, he said as low as a whisper as I inched towards him with the slowest precision, the feet between us drawing less and less.

“Did you spit at your mother today?”

The words still echo inside of my mind to this day, calm and cool, as if discussing the weather, but the expressionless face is what left me hollow. I have seen that face in my nightmares many times.

I finally reached him and looked down at the tile floor. “Look at me when I talk to you. Did you spit at your mother?” he said again.
I blinked rapidly back and forth between the two of them standing before me and finally managed a choked up, guilty “Yes” and felt hot tears welling behind my eyes. I sensed I had done wrong and lying always made my stomach hurt.

Before I felt my tears release, however, a loud CRACK! would fill up my eyes, my ears, my skull; my entire head was ringing. I remember seeing darkness and then seeing stars before I understood what the term “seeing stars” meant. Suddenly, the ringing in my ears was slowly and eerily replaced by dad’s bellowing voice, his volume now raised to a violent, angry yell. The room came into focus and pain had filled up the area around my jaw. I could not move it open to speak. My father had just back handed me in the face with the full weight of his fist, sending my jaw out of place, and I could feel it.

Once the yelling ceased and I was finally, mercifully sent to my room until dinner, the real pain began to set in and the next few days would be spent trying to convince two non-perplexed adults that something was not right, and my jaw was “wrong” or “crooked”.

“Drama queen.”
“Over-exaggerator.”
“Over-reactor.”
“You are fine.”


All of these phrases would be used throughout my youth to describe any matter of ailments or injuries I would sustain from my father and this incident was just the beginning of many.

He always barked that it was ‘for our own good’ and, my personal favorite, that he ‘didn’t like having to do it’. No one told him to, no one forced him at gunpoint that I can recall, so whichever higher calling outside of his own miserable childhood experience enticed him to continue passing the tradition along was a choice entirely of his own.

From the jaw incident forward branched lines to many more, worse occurrences that blueprinted the dynamic between misbehavior and consequences in our household. I can still remember the pain his beatings caused. Sometimes, my dreams render so real that I can feel them happening again. In some warped reality of his own, I think he thought he had control over his strength because there was never ‘any way he was hitting us hard enough to be worthy of the tears it caused’.

I am grown now and my jaw still clicks in pain and uncomfortably falls out of place in the direction I was hit. My teens would later be spent telling myself that I had a ‘magic jaw’ since now, I was able to crack every joint in my body, including my jaw.

~ For No One, by A. L. Stippich

Everyone has a story, even small children. They remember, they scar, and they carry, sometimes for the rest of their lives, just like you.

Whether you choose to ignore it or choose to listen is up to you.

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